marketing

Here is an example from the long-running Progressive campaign featuring the lovable character, Flo. It uses the metaphor tool. The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.

This past weekend, a New York Times story written by Patrick Healy described how Broadway is adopting the newest trend in pricing models - dynamic pricing. The article - Broadway Hits Make Most of Premium Pricing - highlighted the recent success of performances like "Hugh Jackman; Back on Broadway" in leveraging dynamic pricing.

The UK is drowning in junk. In seven years there will be nowhere left to put it – check out this story on Packington (which sounds suspiciously like “pack it in”), one of the many landfills surging towards capacity. It covers about 380 acres and contains more than 18.5 million tons of rubbish. The height of a skyscraper where once there was flat land, it is, literally, a waste of space.

The longer I’m in the business world the more I treasure the rare and refreshing virtue of humility. We’re all imperfect people, and marketing is an imperfect business where subjective decisions rule the day—unlike science, engineering and even accounting, there are no tenets of physics, mathematics or even generally accepted accounting principles that can definitively determine whether something is right or wrong, true or false, or will or will not work.

Emerging Technologist Franz Dill on P&G: It has always been a numbers and modeling company, though there have been some attempts in recent years to move it sharply into a design direction. I think there are lots of opportunities to meld the two together. Here in the McKinsey Quarterly, a good view of the current direction.

Earlier this week, as anticipation for Cyber Monday reached a fever pitch, some interesting bits of news largely escaped notice. First was the speculation that Microsoft’s Kinect motion and voice control systems might be integrated into TVs.

To quote the President, Steve Jobs put the internet in our pocket – and with it the gateway to most human knowledge and connectivity in something that costs about the same as a pair of shoes or a good bottle of wine. I think of four things that stay with me and I think will stay with me for the rest of my life as loyal member of the Apple community:

If your marketing wins an award for creativity, that’s pretty cool. If you test a cutting-edge new technology or channel, please let us know how it goes. If you’re constantly testing new, innovative ideas and offers and strategies, you’re doing the right thing.

But this raises an interesting question - does any industry face a range of factors, constraints, regulation and competition such that innovation reaches a point where innovation is nearly impossible - or, where innovation reaching some point of diminishing marginal returns?

I have been lucky enough to know Andy Stefanovich for over seven years. He is Chief Curator and Provocateur at Prophet, a strategic branding and marketing consultancy, and the author of Look at More. More importantly to me, he is on my personal Top 10 list of cool, creative, innovation catalyst's I turn to for inspiration. Andy a truly innovative thinker and a change agent like no other.